Living with Shadows Read Online Free Page A

good at. It didn’t help when every time she looked up, Cathy was scowling at her from over the top of her glasses. It made her feel uncomfortable and she wondered what thoughts were going through her head. She also wondered how long it would be before she considered herself as qualified for this job as she did the others. Beneath all this angst was the realisation that, first, she would have to believe in herself and, hopefully, the rest would follow.
    Word went up that the inmates were on their way. There was the usual scuffle for bags and papers and then away to the classrooms. The lads dribbled in a few at a time and took their seats. She was about to start the lesson when another student walked into the room and took a seat by the window. It was Michael. He caught her eye and turned to the window to avoid her gaze. Kate handed out the folders and asked them to be getting on with their work before checking why Michael was in her class.
    Pulling out a chair from beneath the desk, she sat down next to him. ‘I’ll be careful how I choose my words today.’
    ‘What? Oh . . . yesterday.’ He looked away and shifted around in his seat. ‘I’ve joined up for your class. I want to learn to read and write better.’
    She looked at his hands and noticed he was trembling. ‘Good . . . well, we’d better find out what you need to learn. Usually, people aren’t too sure so I’d like you to do as much of this as you can.’ Kate handed him a literacy test and went through it with him. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t do all of it.’
    He took the paper and then turned to her with a cheeky grin. ‘Okay, I’ll give it a go.’
    ‘Good.’ He had a pleasant smile with just a hint of shyness in his eyes which Kate thought quite charming. She left him to it and went around the class helping the others. Everything was going fine until she came to Andy, a young man of mixed race. He grumbled that he couldn’t do the work he’d been set and was obviously frustrated by it. She sat down next to him and began to explain the task but he pushed it to one side and started grumbling about something a ‘screw’ had said to him that morning. Several pairs of eyes bored into her as she tried to reason with him. Michael looked up from his work but when she caught his eye he quickly put his head down and carried on with his test.
    ‘Some of these screws think they can treat us like shit just because we’re in here. We’re not scum, you know. They get a kick out of trying to wind us up.’
    Andy ranted on vociferously and Kate feared he would alert the prison officers in the corridor. ‘Well, why not try and forget it. It won’t do any good getting all worked up about it.’
    ‘This is the worst prison I’ve been in. The food’s crap and it’s always cold by the time it’s dished up. It isn’t fit for pigs when you get it.’
    It was obvious there was no reasoning with him. ‘Okay, you just sit there and have a good moan. I don’t suppose you’re in the mood for work today, anyway.’
    As she walked away, she wondered if she was right in taking that action,—just allowing him to sit there and sulk. What if the others followed suit? Yet it was difficult to think of an alternative. Looking around the class, no one seemed to have stopped work or indeed to be taking notice anymore. Perhaps it had been the right thing simply to let him be.
    She went back to Michael, who appeared to have finished the test but was just taking a breather. She picked up his paper and quickly read through the work he had done so far. ‘Mmm . . . from this, it seems your main problems are punctuation and spelling.’
    ‘I never know when to use full stops, so I don’t bother, and I know I can’t spell,’ he confessed. ‘I taught myself to read and write.
    This last statement struck a chord and she turned towards him. ‘How come you didn’t learn at school?’
    ‘Because I hardly ever went.’
    Again, his eyes expressed something